


mortal remains

by feralphoenix



Series: go the fuck to mimir (and other bedtime stories) [2]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Brother-Sister Relationships, Character Study, Child Death, Colonialism, Don't copy to another site, F/F, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Genocide, Grief/Mourning, Imperialism, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Politics, Pollution - Freeform, Spoilers, Tragedy, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, sexual cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26711647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: The life and times of a bereaved and angry mantis now known only as "Traitor Lord".(Wherein the Radiance tells a fussy baby a bedtime story.)
Relationships: Mantis Lords & Traitor Lord, The Hollow Knight | Pure Vessel & The Radiance, Traitor Lord & Traitor Lord's Daughter, Traitor Lord (Hollow Knight)/Original Male Character, Traitor Lord's Daughter/Ze'mer | Grey Mourner
Series: go the fuck to mimir (and other bedtime stories) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960993
Comments: 27
Kudos: 63





	mortal remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inverts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverts/gifts).



> _(I would rather die of passion than of boredom._ – a mass of fools and knaves)
> 
> **small caveat before we get started:** the framing device of the story implies that because of the people they grew up around, hollow has picked up hallownest-typical views of the bugs that resisted the pale king's rule. it is not really their fault as pre-black egg they were never exposed to other viewpoints even once, but, it bears mentioning that i'm taking a more realistic slant on how hollow's childhood might have affected their worldview so people aren't shocked at the suggestion that fandom's favorite sweet babie could be flawed haha.
> 
> this "bug racism" per se deliberately parallels the bigoted view many settlers have of native populations in colonized countries. again bc of the framing device you will only see salty responses to these prejudiced perspectives, but like, please go in aware that that's an aspect of this story.
> 
>   
> along with parallels to real australian history, my portrayal of the struggles the mantis tribe faces are shaped by things in-game that remind me of us & canadian mistreatment of wrongfully displaced native peoples and western meddling in the middle east.
> 
>   
> **small caveat #2:** this fic discusses the canon implications of traitor lord being trans and surviving having a child (for those confused: please take a minute to look up mantid reproductive behavior--which i think the tags should alert people i'm talking about--to avoid eating your feet).
> 
> also, while the mantis tribe is familiar with and has been impacted by hallownest's (western) ideas of gender--the titled mantis characters understand/relate enough to hallownest's (western) concept of transness that they would refer to themselves as trans, for instance--they are trying to preserve their indigenous views of gender, which are very un-western. part of this is that they don't have a native concept of designated sex and reproductive roles aren't gendered in their eyes.
> 
> please keep these 2 points in mind while deciding whether to read this story (and, like, be respectful if you're from a western/christian background)!!

Listen. I am going to tell you a story.

Yes, the story is about a bug. Yes, to the best of my knowledge, this story is true.

His name? …He himself has forgotten what that was. His name was struck from the annals of history as a matter of course—amongst his people this is the consequence of his actions. Within Hallownest… I wonder whether they ever bothered to learn his name in the first place. They so rarely acknowledge those of us who resist assimilation as people.

But the fact of the matter is that he is a person. A bug, like any other; a bug like you.

He cannot tell his story anymore, and his people will not. But someone must, and so I shall. To be known, to be remembered, is the least any of us deserve in this life.

So you must listen. Listen, and know him, and remember him.

He and his partner made love for the last time in a hideaway deep into the part of Greenpath claimed by the White Root as her personal garden.

It had been their favorite trysting spot for some time, chosen from a mixture of youthful daring—while they only needed a quick trip through the Fungal Wastes and across the canyon to enter the garden, this place was very far indeed from the parts of the crater where their kind were allowed to be—and a desire for something private, something only theirs. And chosen, as well, in desperation. For even the little pockets of the garden rarely peopled by other bugs were kept pristine of refuse, a luxury the mantis village had not enjoyed for many generations.

“Don’t you think we’ve put this off long enough, love?” his partner said low and gentle against his back, just above the spot where as a youth his wings had sprouted.

He said nothing in response, breathing in the warm natural scents of moss and greenery, the foreign perfume of thorny flowers bigger than most bugs’ whole bodies, a perfume his ancestors had grown up with for so long they’d ceased to register it as foreign at all. He lay still on the ground with his partner’s warm weight upon his back, those deft claws snug on either side of his thorax, and he strained with all his senses to capture every sensation of this moment from the sounds and scents to the movement and rush of fluid inside him and the pulse of their two hearts. He tried to grasp it all as though both their lives depended upon it. As though he were a nymph on his first hunt once again, waiting for his prey to approach, desperately out of bounds and as fearful of being discovered as he had been of bungling his ambush and disappointing the former Lords. As though if he were just perfect enough, still enough, swift enough, strong enough, he could carry this moment home in his claws safely and everything would be all right.

His partner whispered his forgotten name into the base of his neck and shuddered. His own breath caught. They finished within moments of each other but lay still even after, no effort upon his part to shrug off his partner and his partner making no move to dismount.

He considered his partner’s claws, mind hazy with every emotion a bug might experience at such a time. The mantis tribe are best known for their warriors, and he was one of their proudest and fiercest, but his partner was less a fighter than an architect. Oh, his partner could fight as well as any if need be, and the dances they’d woven together in their formal courtship had been a splendid sight to behold—so beautiful and skillful that even bugs with less appreciation of the martial would have wept to witness it. But his heart lay in creation—in honing the hooked tools the mantis tribe used to climb solid walls and gifted to worthy allies, in building and repairing the mechanisms used in doors and switches, in weaving clever traps to keep the village safe from intruders, in creating furniture. In improving upon the extant to forge a path for the mantises to walk ever forward into the future, a path Hallownest and its pale worm of a monarch ever sought to undermine.

One of his partner’s arms wrapped gentle now around his abdomen, tucked carefully sideways to avoid touching him with the blade. He was already quite gravid then—not yet due in the very near future but far along enough for any mantis to tell from a glance.

His partner said his name once more, tender, and kissed his shoulder with gentle mandibles. “What we have isn’t enough,” he said, as though begging. “We can’t increase our prey quota without the risk of attracting Hallownest’s attention. And we may be able to get in here easy enough but eating all the pollen in the world can’t guarantee us anything.”

“We could try again,” he said to his partner in a little, bleak voice he would never have let his sisters or his warriors hear.

“We can’t know if we will live to try again,” said his partner, kissing his shoulder once more. “There are no guarantees for us, in a world like this. Right now we are alive and there are eggs growing in your belly, and there are no guarantees but—but I want our children to have the surest chance. The same as every other parent who makes this choice.”

“I love you,” he said to his partner, in the despair of acquiescence.

“I love you, too,” his partner said, smiling against his back. “And I love them. I know you’ll love them and take care of them, and I trust that you’ll pass on to them all my love and all my care as well.”

“I will,” he said. “I promise you,” he said. “I promise you that if our children survive, I shall see them thrive,” he said.

And he swiveled his head around and severed his partner’s head with one clean bite.

Still wet from their sex, abdomen heavy with becoming, he rose up over his partner’s still body and ate solemnly of the warm corpse. And then, his jaws messy with blood, he dug into the ground with his powerful warrior’s claws and buried the remains. His claws would never be as clever with small things as his partner’s—but he would still set a stone here in the days to come, to proclaim his remembrance, his respect, his love.

Even without a stone he would never forget the spot.

What is there I can say to you of the mantis tribe?

I know full well how they’re thought of in the pale worm’s kingdom. How you have learned to think of them, as well: Brutal savages, primitives, unfit for civilized society, bloodthirsty and full of shocking customs. Yes. The disgust you cannot speak is loud in your mind as a scream. (—Let’s not have this same argument again.) You have never even seen their dwellings for yourself. It is very likely that you’ll never live long enough to witness their grandeur with your own eyes.

This is a tragedy for many reasons. But, come. Rather than simply take my word for it, let me show you. Blame your father for how limited the view is and how poor the visibility. If I had my way I would let you hear them, as well—their music, their language. But I cannot hear anything through the creatures who’ve become saturated in our tears. Believe you me, I have tried.

Can you see from here, through this shrumal creature’s view, how delicate is their machinery? They prefer to build with organic materials, you know. There, that lever you see is constructed mostly from bone and chitin. The ligaments are, I believe, strung from sinew. And that wall you see there, covered in spikes—many of them are carved from stone, but that section there is patched together from the claws and fangs of large prey.

And here, through the eyes of this… mossfly, I believe? Look at the mantis settlement in the lower Greenpath, the land the White Root stole. They are not true weavers like the spiders but you see how they are as adept with cloth as the bugs of Hallownest. There is no way for me to show it to you, but deep within their village in the Fungal Wastes the main tribe has nursery rooms where youths and nymphs sleep in beds made from cloth and the repurposed remnants of used oothecae.

Of course these things aren’t built to _last._ Their makers would scoff at such a notion. When something wears away and breaks it can be replaced by something new and better. Broken tools can be returned to the earth easily without causing it harm. If your pale worm had any sense of humility or respect he should bow before them and gratefully study every scrap of knowledge they’d deign to share when it comes to invention and innovation.

And yes, they are a warrior people, but they value fairness and honor as much or more than any of your kingdom’s touted knights. Why do you _think_ it means so much to earn their Lords’ respect. They fight because it is what their bodies are built for, it is how they feed themselves, and they fight too for the joy of accruing strength and skill. Wanton violence may be appalling, but an obligate carnivore must eat. There is nothing cruel or unnatural about that.

Would that you had the opportunity to see them _dance._

The spiders once recorded their history upon their looms. My people had our songs, and we studied the warp and weft of the Dream. The mantises remember all the history of this land through their dance. And it is, to my knowledge, as accurate as any other native people’s history if not more so. Far more accurate than the kingdom’s account, riddled with lies as it is.

And there is more. There is so, so much more that can only be told from their own mouths. All of their history, the stories behind each of their particular customs, how they came to call that village their home. Things that aren’t for me to tell. Things an outsider like myself cannot know the answers to.

At least understand that by hearing the story of one man you are getting as full a picture of mantis society as you would of the whole crater if all you’d ever seen is the little town on the surface. It is a glimpse, nothing more.

Even after everything the clutch he laid was very small, by mantis standards.

He could not leave the ootheca be for a moment, lost sleep watching it, so afraid was he that the embryos would not develop enough to hatch, that none of his brood would be born and his partner’s sacrifice all for naught. His sisters brought him his share of the tribe’s prey and told him to sleep in varying states of worry and impatience. He would not sleep, would rarely even eat, unless packed in with one or two of them as though they were newly hatched again.

Only one or two, never all three, for even now waiting for their brother’s children to be born they four siblings were the Mantis Lords. Someone had to be there to lead the tribe. His sisters loved him and loved their people, and being practical bugs they took these things in turns.

It was in a rare stroke of luck that they all four were together when they heard the sounds of shells being torn apart, of little claws tap tap tapping upon the inside of the ootheca. His own claws shook too hard, and so it was his sisters who eased his children’s entrance to the world.

Reality was unkind, as it so often is. Even in a large or average-sized clutch the mantises were rarely able to celebrate the survival of a whole brood; there were always a few eggs that never hatched. This was much compounded by the current delicate state of their tribe, and for all his precautions his brood had fared only slightly better than the norm in those days.

Fifteen eggs he had laid, and of that total a full eight of them showed no signs of life. A ninth was partially broken but the nymph inside had expired halfway into the open—a cursory examination of the tiny corpse showed that the child’s throat and thorax were deformed and once free of its amniotic sac it could not breathe the air; its heart could not support it. Still a tenth and eleventh among the new-hatched nymphs would die suddenly in the night as they slept, one after the other.

But the other four survived.

Even four living nymphs in a brood was a breath of hope in that village, and as bugs who often saw most of a clutch die young or fail to hatch entirely none of the mantises looked askance as he doted upon those lucky four. He brought back weak prey alive from the many places mantises were not supposed to go, and he would set crawlids and tiktiks and mosscreeps loose within the nest for his children and others to play at hunting. When his and his warriors’ shift came for sleep, he would curl his body around his children like a gruzzer with its newborns and relax to the sounds of their little hearts still beating.

Staying up late just to look at them would always mean not enough sleep in the end, as the children would wake very early and then wake their father whispering, or playfighting right up against his abdomen, or clambering out of the hammock to practice flying then making a fuss when they could not get back up.

Oh, but to him it was always worth it, to know that despite everything he had lost here were these four precious lives he had made. Hale and curious and growing by the day, already approaching their first molt.

Of all the Mantis Lords he would likely be the only one to have children: He was far from the only mantis of that generation whose partner had given themself up to sustain a gestating brood. He was the only one of his siblings able to produce eggs, and the Lords were effective leaders because they were many. Every one of them was wise and mighty, but as a whole they were so much more than any one of them could be alone. His sisters could not afford to give up their lives on a prayer for healthy offspring.

As he formed a part of his sisters’ collective, so too would they share in his parenthood. And so these little nymphs, only barely on the brink of their second instar, would be loved and guarded and taught by their aunts as well as their father. It would give them better chances of survival, certainly, and this brought his anxious heart much ease.

If there was only some way for him to guarantee they would flourish, would live to serve the tribe as proud warriors—or by way of whatever other trade they might adopt—for all their adult lives, that they might live to have children of their own without ever facing the painful choice he had made—he would take it without a second thought. No matter what pain or suffering he must face in payment.

But for a tribe positioned by Hallownest as its barrier against Deepnest, no such method existed.

Birth defects and sudden infant mortality were all too common among the mantises in those days. Yes, it’s grim, but it shouldn’t be so shocking, should it? If a childbearing bug spends their days malnourished and breathing poison, it’s hardly a surprise that their body will struggle to produce viable eggs. With your cloistered childhood you’d have had no opportunity to see so for yourself, but surely you can wrap your head around the basic logic.

This isn’t something that was new to their tribe either—though it certainly got worse as time went on. Even the four Mantis Lords as they exist now are the only four survivors of a large brood indeed.

They were the progeny of a previous Lord, you know. Only the three sisters and their lone brother were left to inherit when their predecessors had all died in battle or of old age, but it is hardly that they were the only ones of their clutch to hatch. They had other brothers and sisters, too. Other siblings who died as youths, earlier into a mantis’ life than their people traditionally select a gender. (…Listen, we can discuss gender some other time. I’ll thank you to not derail the topic at hand.)

What killed the others, if not birth defects?

It was sickness, for some. And there was one sibling who—together with the brother and a sister who would one day live to succeed their parent—attempted to cross the canyon into lower Greenpath—yes, that is what I _said,_ lower Greenpath… it was Unn’s land before your mother _stole it_ from the Mosskin, it has always been and will _always_ be a part of the Greenpath regardless of what names Hallownest tries to give it. Just as your weeping city was once the province of the flukes, and the mantises hunted through as many lands as they pleased, and the town of Dirtmouth was home to my _children_ alongside the ancestors of your father’s throngs of little sycophants—

_And I can tell very well what you are doing, so shut the **fuck** up and listen, I shan’t be distracted by your puerile nonsense._

Good.

Of the three siblings who ventured brave and desperate through the canyon in search of the fruits and plants which could be made into medicine for their sick broodmates, one was snarled in the tentacles of your Teacher’s stray jelly creatures. Their future brother and sister, too young to be brother and sister yet, saw the life sucked slowly from their paralyzed sibling and its fresh corpse carried to the jelly’s maw, and they decided that retreat should be the better part of valor that day.

Those sick broodmates died, of course. I don’t know if medicine would have saved them—what they truly needed was a cleaner environment, where they should have been spared falling ill in the first place.

I can’t know what the sister made of her siblings’ loss. Mayhap she felt shame towards her perceived failure to save them, or sadness at their passing.

I can tell you, though, that the brother felt both of those things, and along with them a deep helpless anger at the world that had put his family in this position in the first place.

As to the other mantises in his brood… well. A few of them were slaughtered as youths or early into adulthood, speared upon the nails of Hallownest soldiers for the… _“crime”_ of being caught hunting in lower Greenpath or in the crossroads. But most of them went the way the vast majority of mantises die before their time, and have since their ceasefire with Hallownest.

He always felt sadness and shame at the death of a brother or a sister or a sibling. And he always felt that helpless anger too. As his family fell one by one that sadness, that shame, that anger began to ferment into bitterness as rank and as viscous as Void.

Eh? What’s that common cause of death, you ask?

Shouldn’t that be obvious, if you take the time to think about it?

After all—the mantises are fighting a _war_ for you, are they not?

His child was rushed back to the village, but by then it was already far too late to save their life.

Every mantis knew very well what spider venom does to the body. The youth—for the child was still a youth, too young to choose a gender, full instars too young even to shed their wings—should have been protected, _all_ the youths whose first serious battle it was were meant to have been kept in safer positions, to learn what they were about fighting equally matched foes to the death, for it was their very first skirmish against Herrah the Beast’s shock troops. Her devouts, her phalanxes of wily Weavers.

But the nature of warfare is to never go as planned. (Your and my situation, I think, is proof enough of that for getting along with.)

He was told the details as he knelt in the village plaza, his child’s too-warm body in his arms, but it was not until much later that he would be able to understand it. How can a parent understand the account of how a stray spider made it through the mantises’ front lines, that the youths desperate to prove themselves to the adults rushed in and were summarily overwhelmed, while he holds his child’s spasming body and watches their face contort in agony, as he hears them crying for mercy, that they don’t want to die this way, that they don’t want to die?

“By the time the other children were able to slay the attacker,” he distantly heard someone saying, “it was already too late. The beast had already emptied most of its venom sacs, and the placement of the bite is so bad—”

The placement of the bite was indeed terrible. The injury was right at the top of the child’s abdomen, close enough that the poison should spread throughout their abdomen and thorax alike. Close enough that the poison was already doing its fell work of slowly dissolving his child’s innards.

“—nothing we can do to save them,” the same someone was saying. “And if we let them die this way… it will be very long. They’ll be in excruciating pain. All we can do for them now is give them a painless death. I’m so sorry, my lord. This is all because of our complacency…”

Later, in private, he would rage—rage against the cursed spiders that wouldn’t hesitate to kill little children, truly they deserved to be called _beasts_ —rage against his incompetent warriors who couldn’t fulfill simple orders—rage most of all against Hallownest and its invader king which could not even bother to fight their own battles. He would scream and cut fungal growths to pieces, would dig into the hard earth with his bare claws until the toxins from Hallownest’s sewage stung at the little wounds his efforts had earned him. His sisters would come to restrain him from doing himself any further harm, and caught in their arms, in the gentle press of their bodies, his screams would redouble into sobs so terrible he would be silent for days afterwards, barely even able to hiss in warning. And his sisters would weep with him—the village would weep with him, as all of them honored the life lost too early in noble combat. As he too wept with them whenever a good bug died.

Now, though, he listened numb to the ultimatum told to him and he thought, _I cannot do this. I can’t do this again._ And he said in a very quiet voice, “I will do it.”

“My lord,” someone said.

“I will do it,” he said again, holding his child close as their body seized, as they wailed and as their mandibles frothed. His voice was steady but his claws trembled as they never had before in his life.

“Father,” said a gentle voice at his shoulder—the voice of his eldest child, hoarse with weeping but steady now. He raised his head to behold them, landed awkwardly upon the ground, wings faintly buzzing. They, at least, were unhurt, as were his other two children. “Papa. You don’t have to do this.”

“It is all that can be done,” he said, and then, for this was truer: “It is all I can do.”

“We will do it,” said one of his sisters: For everyone in the village had come, as the news had spread quickly indeed. “Brother, we love you as you love them, and we love them. Allow us to spare you both from this.”

“I must do it,” he said thickly, but the shaking had spread to his whole body and his arms were weak.

“Hold them,” said another sister, not unkindly. “The best thing you can do for them now is to hold them until the very end.”

And so he did not protest when one sister tilted his dying child’s head back, for the sake of a cleaner strike, and another sister added her grip to his to keep their body still. The third sister readied her nail in the periphery, but “Let me,” said his eldest child.

“No,” he said. “You should not have to bear this either,” he said.

“We are family,” his eldest child said, and the sad smile upon their face would have belonged better on a bug twice their age than on a child of theirs. “We will all bear this together.”

So the third of his sisters held him, and his eldest child’s surviving siblings tucked themselves close to either side of them, and he watched his eldest child fit their serrated claw around their dying sibling’s neck.

“Don’t look,” they said with gentleness that ached, voice full of tenderness and grace. Whether they meant those words for him or for the child in his arms, he did not know. He would never be able to bring himself to ask.

They closed their claw with unyielding strength. Blood stained their arm as it stained his.

Days later, when his voice had returned from his fit of grief and long after the body had been buried, he would take his eldest child aside.

“You already have a gender in mind, don’t you,” he said, still hoarse, “for when you’ve had your final molt?”

“Yes,” said his eldest child. “I know I’ll be a woman.”

“You still have many molts before that day arrives,” he said, “but if it is a woman you wish to be I will treat you as one from this day forward—unless you change your mind.”

“Papa,” said his daughter, surprise in her voice.

“You have earned that right,” he told her. “There is not a bug in this village who will contest it.”

She said nothing, but simply rested her small head on her father’s shoulder. They stayed like that for a long time.

Let me tell you something about how the mantis tribe once lived.

The mantises are warriors, yes; they study the art of battle out of love for its beauty and the punishment which they mete out upon their enemies is vicious. This has about as much relation to how they _hunt_ as, say, all that hideous physical abuse the worm called _training_ had to do with the function he designed you for. (Oh, stop wringing your claws at me, I _am_ right and I _should_ say it.)

I believe the proper term in behavioral science is _ambush predator._ (Sadly your Teacher is not here to correct me if I am wrong.) A mantis will hide and wait for prey, perhaps stalk their meal, and only when the time is right leap from cover to kill it with swift claws and deadly mandibles.

And they are obligate carnivores. No, you are not mistaken, you do correctly recall a conversation between our hero and his mate about eating pollen. A mantis may supplement their diet with some plant matter—the nutrients in pollen particularly are supposed to promote prenatal health in a gravid mantis, from what I gather—but they cannot survive without eating meat.

I see you have grasped the problem here.

It _wasn’t_ a problem for them before your pale worm arrived. The mantis tribe has lived as a colony for a long, long time, reaching back into the prehistory. It suited them to have a dwelling separate from their hunting grounds, in a place where they need not worry overmuch of competition from other predators. And the mushroom tribe never minded so much to live in close quarters with the mantises, for they had no worry of being eaten.

Think of their _coloring._ Blues, greens, grays. I’ve told you already they hunted in the great basin where your people built their weeping city, haven’t I? That their hunts took them into the Greenpath and through the upper tunnels. Places where wild bugs roam as plentiful prey and rivals can be fought, places where a stalking hunter born with a shell in cool colors can easily blend in.

While the mantises roamed, Deepnest had already been claimed by the native spiders and by the Weavers, who formed one colony and shared their knowledge and technology to build their flourishing capital. Those dark warrens are full of crawling things for spiders to hunt, and spiders aren’t shy of eating anything that ventures into their territory, not even other predators. Back in those days the two tribes gave each other a wide berth and were glad of it.

There was balance in these lands before Hallownest because all seven of the major civilizations that existed in those days had established our own comfortable niche in the ecology. Of course there was conflict, from time to time; of course things were not perfect. I’ve told you before that imperfection is a vital part of being alive. But my children lived where they had access to the open air and could cultivate my light, and the spiders and mantises followed their prey. The Hive had their pathways to collect pollen and even back then Unn’s children would allow other bugs into their fertile lands as long as strangers worked no mischief. The flukes found a home in the dark and wet, as was most comfortable for them. The mushrooms camouflaged themselves among other fungi. The shamans practiced their craft in solitude; bugs of different kinds who drifted here from other kingdoms gathered in the surface city or found other places to live. Everyone knew better than to disturb the domain of the dormant Void, and we let it be.

This tragedy, then, is a natural consequence of that balance being disrupted and destroyed. The worm’s behavior towards _all_ of his neighbors is monstrous. My people and I are hardly his only victims.

You would do well to keep this in mind.

His first reaction when his daughter told him the bug with whom she had fallen in love was not a mantis was relief, if you can believe that. It’s true, mantises aren’t particularly friendly to outsiders who haven’t earned their respect, and for a tribe whose very survival was in jeopardy, strange bugs who sought to take a mantis for a mate were often thought of as little better than poachers.

But in the years that had passed he had already buried both his sons: One lost honorably in battle with Deepnest, his life celebrated and mourned equally by the whole village. One lost to suicide—that son took an injury to the abdomen in a skirmish with Hallownest soldiers, caught hunting out of bounds. The wound cost him the clutch he’d been carrying, and festered so he’d never be able to become gravid again. The son’s spirit sickened and weakened from the despair, and so he followed his wife and his brother into the grave.

Only the eldest child, our hero’s only daughter, remained alive.

And she was not a childbearing bug. Between the difficulty of hunting and Hallownest’s pollution, the health of the village continued to decline so that more and more bugs gave up their lives as sustenance for gravid partners. So if she took a partner among their own people with whom she could have children, and chose to have a clutch with that partner, she would almost definitely die.

He had lost so many children by then that he could not bear to lose the very last. Even seeing her with an outsider was preferable to her death, he thought.

“Who is she, this bug you’ve met?” he asked her, more than once.

She would always laugh at him: “Oh, Papa, we aren’t anywhere _near_ the stage where I could bring her home with me! You and the aunts would make her duel you all at once for the honor of my claw in marriage and we haven’t even been seeing each other that long! You mustn’t scare my girlfriend off by rushing things like that!”

“You could at least tell me what she’s like. What it is that draws you to her so.”

On this subject, at least, her tongue was quite loose. Every day he pressed her on it she would reveal a little more to him.

The portrait she painted for her father was of a flower-loving bug fierce in combat—“I don’t know if even the aunts could fight with her greatnail, it’s _enormous!”_ —but shy and retiring in conversation. “She came to this land from very far away and I think she’s been lonely, she says the bugs she works with and the great lady she serves are always kind to her but her silences have such sorry shapes. I think the other bugs where she lives think her odd, or maybe they have trouble understanding her accent. Of course I don’t understand her original language but every word she speaks in it is beautiful, as beautiful as she is.” His daughter would not say much of her lover’s appearance, too crafty to spill to him what this mystery bug’s species was. All he knew was that she was tall and powerful.

“She always tells me _such_ stories, of all the places she’s been,” his daughter went on. “All those faraway countries sound so wondrous. But she swears to me that our own home’s beauty is a match for any of the lands she’s seen. The city, and our own Fungal Wastes, and especially the Queen’s Gardens…”

He frowned at her. “Did you just call lower Greenpath _the Queen’s Gardens?”_

His daughter closed her mandibles and said no more. He did not press her: He did not need to. None of their tribe called that part of Greenpath by that name. Neither did the spiders, and neither—to his knowledge—did any of the other nations that still resisted the light of the pale worm’s beacon. Even the shrumal creatures, who accepted the worm’s rule, still kept their old language and called the area by their own ancestral name for it.

So. His daughter’s lover was a Hallownest bug.

It was the mention of a greatnail that worried him most. A large bug that wielded a greatnail—his mind was filled with images of Hallownest’s heavy infantry, the vicious giants trained in the nail and shell who could kill a mantis in a single blow. If such a creature courted his daughter—what if it deceived her, took advantage of her romantic nature? And even if its affection was genuine, what then of its kindred? If another soldier caught wind of their relationship and took umbrage to it… His daughter was trained in combat as well as any other mantis, but if taken unawares…

Very late one night his daughter slipped from the village towards lower Greenpath. He remembered the long-ago trysts he’d had with her other father, how much the privacy had meant to him, and it pained his heart, but he had to know. He had to see for himself how worried he should be for her welfare.

A middle-aged bug he was, but also a seasoned warrior—and one does not remain a Mantis Lord for so long without being a skilled hunter, either. So he killed the sound of his steps in the brush, killed the sound of his breath, and he tracked her across the land, hid himself in the foliage at a distance so he could see her and who it was she met with.

The sole blessing of the night was that her meeting place was nowhere near the place she’d been conceived, and where her other father had died. No, she waited for her lover amidst the open rooms and gazebos of silver architecture the White Root had ordered be built, native flora all but choked out of existence by the giant green-and-silver flowers Hallownest’s Queen preferred. Bellied down between those flowers, he watched his daughter linger at a black iron bench—and saw a tall silver bug approach her.

Even at a distance he knew that silhouette, the doubled antennae. She was unarmed, but one of Hallownest’s Great Knights was still deadly without a weapon.

Yes, his daughter’s lover was a bug you knew well enough: Ze’mer, who came to serve your parents from lands afar.

His body moved automatically: He rushed from his hiding spot in the flowers, powered across the mossy ground and planted his body between his stunned daughter and the yet more bewildered knight. There he reared back to his full height and spread his arms to the knight to show her his claws, made himself look as large and vicious as possible, and hissed.

“Stay away from my child,” he said in a low rumble.

_“Papa!”_ his daughter shouted from behind him with outrage in her voice. “This is none of your business!”

“She is Hallownest’s creature.”

_“Father,”_ his daughter said, ever sharper. “Hallownest is awful but—but not every bug that lives there has a wicked heart!”

“This is so,” he said. “Perhaps this would be different if she were a common citizen. But you know who she is. All their military are the wyrm’s serving-beasts—the weapons he uses to exterminate any who won’t worship at his feet. Their Great Knights stand at the peak of that military and each of them is as a claw upon the wyrm’s outstretched arm. Have you forgotten what happened to your brother because of bugs like her? To your neighbors, to your friends?”

“My Ze’mer had nothing to do with any of that! She’s not _like_ the others, she’s different, she came from so far away and she doesn’t fit in with them either, I know you could understand each other if you just gave her a chance—”

“A chance, is it?” he said. “Very well.” And he adjusted his stance from his threat display, lowering his claws slightly. “Ze’mer is your name?”

“Yes,” said the huge knight. He thought that her high waifish voice did not suit one of her bulk and profession.

“Cast your nail aside and leave the kingdom,” he said. “Abandon your Pale King and never look back. Prove by doing so that you will not bring harm to my daughter or my people, for the master you serve would use us for tools until we are destroyed, all to further his own ego. Only by cutting ties with them can you ensure your fellows won’t kill my child simply for associating with you. Do you truly love her, truly care for her welfare, or are you like every other Hallownest bug, and too brainwashed for anything to dwell in your dried-up heart but the wyrm?”

“Le’mer, cruel choice you would force upon che’,” said the knight, clasping her claws together, her large body bowed. Now that she spoke at length he could hear the unfamiliar music of her inflection. “Che’ cannot—che’ owes a great debt to those who gave che’ home and hearth after eternity wandering. All che’ woulds’t give for meled’love, if che’ had such freedom. Ai. But che’ cannot forsake nym’King so easily.”

“Then get out, Hallownest scum, and do not show your face before our people again.”

_“Papa!”_ his daughter cried, grasping at his arm so her claws scraped a warning against his carapace. “You’re being unfair!”

“Her king has never once treated us with fairness,” he said to her, hissing again at the cowering knight who now wrung at her own claws and began to moan. “If she cannot or will not quit her position as his pawn she will be your doom. If she truly loves you as you believe she does, she’ll leave you be.”

“Is an outsider like che’ so unwelcome?” said the knight, her thin little voice quavering. “So hateful in Le’mer’s eyes?”

“You threaten us with death should we leave the land allotted to us,” he said, snarling in full now. “You starve us, poison us dumping your city’s raw sewage beside our village, and even then you send us to fight and die in battle with cruel beasts. Sovereignty bought with such mean servitude is no sovereignty at all. If Deepnest were to destroy us Hallownest would not weep. If we were to bleed Deepnest dry the wyrm surely plans to devour us alive while we are weak.”

“Don’t _listen_ to him, Ze’mer, my love,” cried his daughter. “You bear no sin in the evil your king has wrought. Your heart is good and kind.”

“She and the other so-called _Great Knights_ enforce his law and uphold his cruel system,” he said. “So long as she is her king’s knight she is complicit. If his evil pained her _good, kind heart_ she would quit her post without a second thought.”

**_“Papa!”_** roared his daughter, but he bustled her behind him and hissed at the knight again.

“If you won’t stop letting the king ride you like a flukemother in heat, then stay away from my daughter,” he said to the knight, whose face creased and who flinched belatedly as she worked out his insult. “You are unworthy even to be in her presence. Bugs like you are the sinkhole in the universe where honor goes to die. Mark my words, this whole tribe will know you, and for as long as you serve your false royalty you shall not come near our borders ever again.”

With his greater bulk and strength he herded his daughter away from that place, though she fought him all the way with mandible and claw. Left behind in the White Root’s gazebo the great knight began to wail _ullll waaaaaaaaaaaaaaii,_ but her wispy voice was dampened by the thickness of the invasive plants and it was not long before she could no longer be heard.

What’s this? You believe _poison_ to be a gross overstatement on the Mantis Lord’s part?

I can’t even be truly angry at you for this one because it’s not as though you’ll have had much experience dealing with fecal matter. So, very well, you can have a quick lesson before we move on.

Yes, there are kinds of bugs that thrive in organic waste. Dung beetles hoard and live in the stuff, for instance. But feces carries disease, and if not disposed of safely that disease can strengthen and spread and devastate entire communities of living creatures. Most especially important is to keep dung separate from drinking water, as water will spread disease much faster.

I know you have not oft been to the City of Tears, but you remember it has plumbing, do you not? Have you never spared a thought before now as to _where those sewers empty?_

…No, of course you haven’t. The worm and the White Root never cared, and neither did their flock of cheeping worshippers; they wouldn’t have spared a thought for who they inconvenienced. Who would have said anything where you could hear it and think upon what you’d heard? Much of the harm your father has inflicted upon we who came before him has been intentional, but in this I believe it likely it just never occurred to Hallownest what they have done.

Hallownest’s sewer system leaks some waste near the corpse the worm shed when he chose to masquerade as a bug, but the vast majority of it is offloaded in the Fungal Wastes, directly next to the mantises’ village. The manure does not disturb the fungi, but it’s contaminated what should have been the mantises’ drinking water for many generations now.

The situation for the mantises would be dire enough if it were _only_ feces that Hallownest deposits in the only home they are allowed. Metalworkers’ and scientists’ waste water runs into those sewers, filled with chemical pollutants that precious few bugs’ bodies can process. That toxic chemicals are poisonous should be a no-brainer, even for a bug as ignorant as you. As for trace metals—lead, for one—the body cannot dispose of them and so they build up and weaken a bug from the inside, causing cancers and wasting sicknesses, diseases of the brain or other vital organs. The newly hatched are especially vulnerable, and tainted water or food will kill them swiftly and painfully. Gravid bugs’ exposure to disease and poison kills the young in their bellies before they can even lay their eggs, or seeps into the embryo to cause fatal deformities as it grows. You remember the child that died immediately after hatching, its organs incomplete? There are many more grotesque cases. Nymphs or larvae whose brains form outside their bodies. No, do not turn away from this. It is a truth you need to understand.

I have not even got to possibly the worst part! Those foolish bugs drunk on the idea of magic would dump corpses into the sewers, sometimes. Ordinary murderers would dispose of their victims in the same way. Isn’t that just obscene? No funerary rites. No remembrance, no song to help their souls ascend and become a part of the Dream.

…You Hallownest bugs don’t care so much about those things, do you. Well. Corpses come to carry all kinds of disease in and of themselves as they decompose, and when added to the foul slurry of feces and pollutants they become breeding grounds of still worse sickness.

All of this, in the only sources of water easily accessible to that village. All of this soaking into the earth surrounding it, choking it with poison so nothing but hardy fungus could grow. All of this, while the mantises were required by Hallownest law to stay in the wastes at all times so as to stanch Deepnest’s advances on the kingdom. What were they meant to drink? What were they meant to eat?

Hallownest only cared about them inasmuch as they stayed where they had been told and fought Hallownest’s own stupid war. And recall your own reactions to hearing about the mantises’ ways, when we had just got started. Even if ordinary citizens knew their actions threatened to starve an entire nation, to kill them slowly through terrible disease, they would not have cared enough to take the simple actions that would have been necessary to stop it happening. In Hallownest the mantises’ nobility and honor, their resourcefulness and cleverness, their great tenacity and courage and the beauty of their arts are not recognized. You all think of them as savage brutes, only barely a step away from beasts.

Have you begun to truly understand the horrors your father wrought upon this land? Do you yet have even the slightest inkling as to why so many of Hallownest’s neighbors despise it? Or do you still think I’m merely making all this up to fuck with you?

The mantises’ hatred and disdain for your kind runs as deep as my own.

It is every ounce as merited.

He explained the situation to his sisters, who explained the situation to the rest of the tribe in his place, as he was still too furious. And as one the mantises made sure to chase the knight away whenever she approached.

His daughter refused to speak to him for the better part of a season. He let her be. Hers was such a caring nature and she thought the best of everyone; surely between that and her romantic feelings it must be hard for her to understand the practicality of his judgment. If when he was her age someone had tried to separate him from his partner, even for his own good, he would have been incensed by it as well.

Her silence came to an end as the season turned from hot to cool; as he sat keeping watch over the entrance to the canyon she arrived and sat beside him in the moss. The bubble-like jelly growths that parasitized the full of the canyon forced them into such close quarters their shoulders almost touched. For some time he waited for her to speak, but when she continued to sit mum for over an hour he realized she had instead come to hear what he had to say for himself.

“I will not ask you to forgive me, for I know I have gravely hurt your heart,” he said. “But I would rather you live a long life and hate me for the rest of it than see you slaughtered by that knight’s comrades.” Here his voice broke. “That cursed kingdom has already stolen so much from us. From me. I can’t call myself your father and let them take you too.”

“I don’t hate you, Papa,” she said. “I think you’re inflexible and a fool, and I am angry. But I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I love you.”

He put his face in his claws and wept. Presently his daughter laid her little head on his shoulder, cheek cushioned on his cloak.

“My Ze’mer will prove you wrong yet,” she said, deliberately light. “I’ll live to see the day when you and she are fast friends. How can you not be? For you both love me so much, and your hearts are so kind.”

“If she ever does denounce the wyrm, I suppose I shall give her a second chance, just for you,” he said, and laughed even through his tears.

But the timing was poor. You see, that was the very season in which I began to send out my call. Hallownest in its cruelty tried to block me out, to suffocate me further in silence, and so I called out louder still… and you know well how that ended.

What _is_ the mantises’ secret anyway, you wonder? Suffice to say they understood enough of the situation to know an attempt to silence my call would only make it worse. They did listen, just enough to go unaffected.

I don’t find it particularly pleasant that they decided my people’s plight was not their problem, but I respect very much that they never explained the source of their lucidity to Hallownest and let the kingdom have its just desserts.

At any rate, once bugs became overwhelmed by our tears and began to sleepwalk, the mantises tightened ranks against outsiders even more. Usually their reputation kept curiosity seekers and hooligans away well enough, but dreaming bugs aren’t well known for their common sense and restraint. Even though average Hallownest citizens are weak compared to mantises, they could still harm very small nymphs. The four Mantis Lord siblings were not about to risk that.

Even as Hallownest descended into panic, as they closed off their cities and as the worm schemed to create you, the lives of the tribe did not change so much. They ate a little better as Hallownest was too busy with its own crisis to catch them hunting elsewhere quite as often, but as honorable people they continued to kill spiders and uphold the agreement their ancestors had made.

That day dawned cold, and a noxious fog rose from the polluted waters, irritating the mantises’ lungs. He and his sisters rose from their thrones to advise nymphs and gravid bugs to stay indoors until runners came to report that the air had cleared.

Climbing into the highest parts of the city he reconvened with his daughter and her scouting party, returned from a late night’s shift combing the upper Fungal Wastes for infected creatures. The shrumal creatures, too, had begun to hear my voice, I believe; let us simply say their mental defenses were about as strong as Hallownest’s.

“We dispatched a few stray kingdom bugs,” she reported to him, “but for the most part everything was quiet. It should be all right to take at least a few youths to hunt today if we’re careful.”

“You’ve done good work,” he said, and leaned in to embrace her with one arm and press his forehead to her cheek, still relieved at their reconciliation. She laughed and pushed him away. “Now go home and get some sleep. The air’s bad today so be sure to close up tight.”

“My lord!” called one of his daughter’s sentries, very suddenly. “There’s someone approaching from the east!”

A score of mantis heads whipped around to face the east entrance to the village. It took a moment for him to discern through the haze, but someone was indeed approaching: The silhouette was of a short bug, probably some Hallownest creature. Its stride was stilted and swaying, which portended either some sort of injury—or what your sort call the Infection.

“Halt,” he called out to the approaching bug: If it were already lost to dreams, he reasoned, it would keep approaching, and he could have his warriors go on the offense.

The bug took a few more steps forward, slowly. Then it stopped—just close enough to be fully visible.

The intruder was in a sorry state. Though there were no injuries on their body their robes were bedraggled, and now the mantises could hear that they mumbled to themself beneath their breath. Red-gold haze hung about their head and their eyes were glazed over: The sign of a bug so worn out from trying to silence me that it should soon fall comatose, and begin to sleepwalk not long after.

“Let us not take risks,” he said, raising his claws. The sentries began to follow suit.

“Wait,” his daughter said suddenly, and he looked to her.

She stepped forward once towards the swaying figure. Uneasily he watched her: Strongly he felt that he should pull her back, but truly he did not want to raise her ire again so soon after the matter of her lover.

“That’s Elder Hu,” his daughter said.

And so it was. He remembered this bug—a pompous little sage who had once traveled the wastes (and other lands too, apparently) proselytizing for the worm. But unlike most of Hallownest’s bugs, instead of walling himself up against the bubbling plague of Hallownest’s own wrongdoing, he had continued his travels through his country’s neighbors, bringing alms for the ill. He and his sisters had been quite annoyed by this bug and chased him out of their territory on more than one occasion, but since the elder had at least shown care for Hallownest’s neighbors in his own way, he found it faintly sad to see so rare a bug succumb.

“Then we can at least make his end swift,” he said.

“Wait,” his daughter said. “His infection is still fresh—there’s still time to wake him. If we can get him to respond to our voices… Papa, let me try first.”

Softly he said his daughter’s name, but she silenced him with a look, and strode forward carefully, claws held up but close to her body so that the sick elder should not mistake her movements for a threat display or an attack.

“Elder?” she said gently. “Elder, do you recognize me? Please, don’t panic, just concentrate on my voice.”

Elder Hu raised his masked head and stared at the mantis woman approaching him, still emitting amber fog.

“That’s right,” she said, and stepped forward once more. “You’ll be all right, Elder. You just need to wake up.”

The old sage’s mumbling voice rose, so that the Mantis Lord could clearly hear his words. “—savages, all of them… monsters… monsters, all…”

The Mantis Lord’s daughter stopped in her tracks. “Elder?” she said, her sweet low voice lilting with concern.

The old bug lurched forward, the bangles on his arms glowing with magic. His curled claw struck her square in the thorax, and silver rings of magic burst from it—blasting her body into two halves and a spray of blood, her innards slapping wetly to the earth.

After that he remembers screaming and nothing else.

When the four siblings first ascended to the position of Lord and assumed responsibility for their tribe, he approached his sisters with a grand idea.

“It’s stupid,” he said, fiery with youth and idealism, “to keep fighting Deepnest like this. We should join claws with them instead, and destroy Hallownest together. They’re hardly the only bugs that loathe the kingdom! We can join together with the Mosskin—with the Hive! The moths may be dying out, but I’ve heard tell that _some_ of their remaining numbers aren’t pacifistic fools. Not even Hallownest can stand up to the might of all the peoples of this crater together!”

“We cannot do that,” said the eldest of the sisters. (She was only the _eldest_ by about fifteen minutes, but as the shrewdest of their number the other siblings never begrudged her the honor of calling herself such.)

“There’s so much bad blood between us and the spiders,” said the middle sister. “So many of our generation have lost friends, children, parents to their assaults. Our elders’ grief is so much deeper. If we tried to reverse the treaty and ally with Deepnest without the consensus of the tribe we would be failing them as their leaders, and a consensus would be difficult to get. And even if we were to get that consensus—Deepnest has lost plenty of their warriors to _us._ We have no way to tell if they would be willing to form such an alliance.”

“And it would be going back on our oath,” said the youngest sister. She had been the last of their clutch to hatch, was younger than her brother by a good few minutes. “We’ve been able to keep so little but our honor. Can we really survive sacrificing that honor? Would we be seen as worthwhile allies to anyone if they knew we’d thrown our honor away?”

“Your words do have merit,” he said to his sisters. “But this is a matter of our _survival._ All of us here know that Hallownest means to see us destroyed in the end. They started this conflict between us and Deepnest for their own benefit and laugh at us behind their walls as we do their dirty work for them, weakening the spiders and ourselves in the bargain. Surely we could at least try to reach out to other nations, if not Deepnest?”

The middle and younger sisters looked to each other as if considering his words. The middle sister nodded slowly.

“We cannot,” the eldest sister reiterated, and her voice was both grave and severe. “It is not simply a matter of the blood spilled between us and the people of Deepnest.”

“Explain what you mean instead of being _coy,”_ he said, wrinkling up his face and clicking his mandibles. “You might act the dignified Lord before our tribe, but it’s useless to do that around _us._ None of us three have forgotten you wetting the hammock as a nymph when you had bad dreams, or the time you ran straight into a wall while we learned to fly. Don’t put on airs when we all know each other’s embarrassing secrets.”

The youngest sister ducked her face behind her claws but could not hide her giggles behind them, and the middle sister smiled. The eldest of the four siblings sighed.

“Sorry to interrupt your merriment with serious talk,” she said so dryly they all knew she was not even a little sorry, “but _think._ Where were the Mosskin when Hallownest trapped us in this foul bargain? Where was the Hive then, where were the moth survivors?”

“What are you saying, sister?” he asked.

“I’m saying, brother mine,” she replied a bit more gently, “that if any of them realized we are trapped in poison-stricken lands and risk starvation, they have never offered us their aid. If Hive Queen Vespa is so wise, then why did she not attempt to intercede with the wyrm on our behalf during the treaty _or_ the construction of their damned sewers? The Mosskin are close and know full well we used to hunt in their lands. It would not be much hardship for them to bring us clean water or prey. If there are indeed still insurgent moths, then what are they wasting their time with instead of reaching out to other nations? It’s been _generations._ Where were they? Why have they done nothing?”

He and the two younger sisters stared at her.

“They’ve done nothing to aid us because they’re too preoccupied by their own problems. Their first priority, their _only_ priority in most cases, is their own welfare and survival. The Hive is insular and fatalistic and cares most about the life of its queen. The Mosskin mill about in futile hope that their god will wake and save them from the wyrm’s outstretched claw. The moths are too firmly caught beneath the wyrm’s feet and those few who resist his thrall still flounder about not understanding the scope of how thoroughly he’s destroyed them. In other words, they prioritize themselves. We cannot bring back lost gods and we cannot even take care of our own health, let alone an overgrown bee’s.

“Even if we threw away our pride and begged them for help—they’ve never cared about us before. We can’t naïvely trust them to act in our interests. The only bugs who we know beyond a shadow of a doubt will always be on our side are our own mantises.”

All four siblings were silent for a very long time.

“It will be very difficult,” said the eldest sister, “but we can persevere. We have our honor, we have our wits, and we have our strength. Hallownest will collapse under its own hubris one day. Maybe this will not happen in our generation, or our children’s, or our children’s children’s. But it _will_ happen—anyone with a clear view of the wyrm’s temperament can tell that much.

“We only need endure until then. And all we need to do to endure… is to put ourselves first, as no other bugs will.”

Two of his sisters had to work together to restrain him when Ze’mer the Great Knight came calling.

All of his sisters had grown quite used to restraining him, because they’d had to do so for the dead elder’s burial as well. No matter how patiently they explained that the elder would never have harmed his daughter if the bug had been in his right state of mind, he still raged himself into a right and proper froth at the idea that such a murderer should be honored.

(“Far be it for us to wax mystical like the moths of old,” said the middle sister sternly, “but if we do not pay _all_ the dead their basic dues of remembrance we will be even worse than Hallownest. We will be mere beasts.”

“Then I will be a beast,” he snarled, struggling against her arms and his other sisters’ nails that prevented him using his claws. _“She was my only daughter.”_ )

So two of his sisters held him down, and the eldest pointed her nail at the intruder from Hallownest.

“Leave,” she told the knight. “There is nothing here for you anymore.”

The huge bug who had already been so meek and miserable in the Greenpath was much reduced. The silver lacquer painted upon her shell and the white cloak and mask were both gone—her shell covered in claw scratches, in fact, as though she had stripped the lacquer from her body herself. The naked gray of her true coloring exposed, barefaced, she knelt upon the ravaged earth, bent almost double in mourning. In her claws she clutched something tiny and white.

“Che’ brings… che’ brings a precious gift, the last thing che’ can give to meled’lover,” she said, voice warped from weeping. “So that her heart might yet know che’s love even unto the grave. Only let che’ grant this last token… Che’ has, fulfilled Le’mer’s wish,” she said, and raised her head to look straight into his eyes. “Too late, too late, che’ knows well. But che’ cannot raise her nail anymore, even for nym’King. Che’ woulds’t honor mel’daughter in this. Che’ will leave her post and diminish. Coulds’t you not then let che’ do this one small thing?”

His eldest sister looked at him, a signal she would respect his view in this.

“Get—out,” he growled, struggling again against his sisters’ hold. “After everything she already suffered, everything we have suffered at your hands, I will _never_ let you defile her grave with your nonsense. When she is buried she will rest in a place that I will _guarantee_ you can never reach.”

“It is only out of love for our niece that we spare your life now,” said his eldest sister, brandishing her nail in warning. “Otherwise we would let our brother kill you. Do not let us see you again. Great Knight or no, you will not escape with your life.”

The former knight sunk so low that she was crouched on all her limbs like a wild creature and screamed into the earth until her voice splintered and vanished. His eldest sister watched her shake with sobs impassively, then stepped forward with nail upraised and slapped her across the back with its flat in warning. The former knight hiccupped in surprise and scuttled back. His sister followed her, administering more warning whacks with the blade, until the knight rose to her hind legs and wobbled away.

His sisters held him until she was gone from sight—and then a good long time afterwards, too, just to be safe.

The body of his daughter was still being prepared for burial, unlike the elder’s. Some of this was due to the state her corpse was in and the more distant place her father had chosen for her to sleep, but more of it was that the mantises have their own customs for how to treat a body that won’t be eaten. Those customs are more private by far than their ways—the mantises would not even be happy that a Higher Being like myself has learned them, so they’re definitely none of _your_ business.

Anyway, the morticians could hardly do their work with their subject’s father looming over their shoulders, and the father himself was a warrior and a ruler rather than a spiritual man. So when he was calm enough for his sisters to release him, and they were busy directing their soldiers to clear the way for the burial—he was left to himself, to think.

By the end of the day, he had come to his conclusion, and he had spoken with all of his closest sympathizers—adults and youths alike.

Night came to the Fungal Wastes, and his sisters found him standing at the border.

“You’re about to do something very stupid, aren’t you,” said the youngest sister. “Have you considered: Perhaps _don’t.”_

“See to my girl’s funeral,” he said, ignoring her quip. “And… give my partner my regards while you’re there.” His throat tightened but he continued anyway. “Guard that place well. Make it so that none can enter. Not that sniveling Hallownest creature, and… not even me.”

“Brother, we are all bereaved,” said his middle sister quietly, reaching out to touch his back with her claw. “Please, you cannot let emotion overwhelm your good sense. We need you now more than ever.”

“I can’t stand it anymore,” he said, turning to his sisters. He spread his claws wide. “All I have left is this rage in my heart—and the three of you. I can’t just wait here and bide my time, for if I were to lose any of you, my rage would turn to despair and I would kill myself, as my son did. My pride—my honor—my love for my family will not allow me to make that choice. If perhaps I can do something to change this all…”

“If you do this,” said the oldest sister—and she stepped forward to clutch his face in her claws. He looked upon her, gaunt as their sisters, gaunt as he himself, brittle and proud and stern. “If you do this you will have forsaken your sacred duty to lead and preserve our tribe, to help our people endure until Hallownest falls on its own. If you do this we must brand you Traitor, and outcast you and everyone else who follows you. Never again will you be allowed to return to us, and your name will be forgotten for all time.”

The middle sister quietly said the oldest’s name, perhaps in warning, perhaps in sadness. Perhaps both. The youngest spoke her brother’s name: A plea.

He leaned forward and rested his forehead to his sister’s.

“I love all of you so,” he said to her. To all three of them. “So I cannot turn back. It is time for someone to take a true, proper stand against Hallownest’s evil once more. I will have my vengeance. I am prepared to accept the consequences.”

His youngest sister bowed to the ground and cried out, one long note of frustration and helplessness that ironically mirrored how his daughter’s lover wept. The middle sister pressed her face into her claws and shook with silent tears.

His oldest sister let go of his face and slapped him across the snout with the blade of her right arm. The blow was gentle but the serrated edges of the claw still left small scratches on his face.

Then she held his face between her claws once more and kissed his forehead. When she spoke next there were tears in her eyes but her voice was steady.

“Then begone from this place, Traitor Lord,” she said. “You have made your choice. Never again will you be permitted to return.”

He stepped back and bowed to her. Then he stepped back once more and spread his claws wide, hissing at his sisters. None of them answered his threat display in kind, but they held their nails and watched him as he left.

Later they would strike down his throne, and the four Mantis Lords would become three, and the people would tear their clothes and mourn as though he and his followers were dead. Even when his daughter’s body was buried, her father would only be described as Traitor upon her grave marker. But he cared not.

In the dead of night he led his followers into the lower Greenpath, and they slaughtered the Hallownest bugs in their path until they had found a clearing where they could set up their camp. His mantises set sentries; those off duty retreated into their newly pitched tents to sleep.

The Traitor Lord stayed awake. He climbed to a part of the Greenpath where a trick of the caverns allowed light to filter from the surface, and he watched the stars. He watched the sky begin to turn as the dawn broke.

And he opened his heart to my song.

“You offer me _strength?”_ he sneered. “You offer me strength _now?_ Where were you generations ago when the wyrm came and wrought the doom of this entire region? You’re the moths’ _god,_ are you not? If anything could have stopped that creature it’s a Higher Being like you, isn’t that so? You could have prevented _all of this._ But you didn’t, did you? _Why?_ What has _pacifism_ ever done for you but make you weak, easy prey? Yes—this is your fault. It’s _your fault, **your fault, IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.”**_

On his knees he screamed his grief and rage to the foreign plants taking over the Greenpath and the native earth choking beneath it, to the distant cavern ceiling, to the sky beyond.

“She’s gone,” he howled, “and everything in this world is to blame. The Light that failed to strike down the pretender royalty when it had the chance and Hallownest for using us as their tools and Deepnest for not caring that we were merely pawns and our ancestors for agreeing to such a foolish truce when they could have been courageous and fought back, all the nations of this crater and whatever creatures they worship for never putting a stop to the wyrm, the craven elder for his bigotry and that disgusting foreign bug for encouraging my daughter to be too kind and my sisters for not being there and our warriors for not being fast enough. **_This whole rotten world is beyond saving and you will give me the power to tear it apart in my own two claws, starting with that root’s foul gardens.”_**

And I shone my light down upon him.

“I forgive you your accusations,” I told him as he gazed into my face. I reached out and wiped the tears from his cheek with my feathers. “I forgive you, for it is the nature of the grieving to search for someone to blame. And I shall lend you my strength, if you will lend me yours. Know my grief, as it is not so different from yours. You will know my rage. You will know my hate.

“And I will know yours. You shall remember us. And I… I shall remember you.”

The mantis who would only evermore be known as the Traitor Lord still wept, but through his tears he began to laugh. “Are we so similar, then, after all?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, we are.”

“Then I will walk beside you.”

I held him to me, then. I enfolded his body in my wings and I embraced him in my light.

Hm? What became of him, after that?

…That’s very sweet of you, Vessel. You _have_ come to care.

No, I shan’t tease you any further. The Traitor Lord still lives, and so do his followers. They dwell still in lower Greenpath, though a few have strayed away to occupy themselves with other pursuits. All of them are hardy with my light, and too their strength swells from residing in a place where they can hunt freely. They are hale, and well-fed. The births among their faction have been plentiful and healthy clutches, and the infant mortality rate much lower.

Even now they wage their war upon your mother. It is harder to gauge their progress from here, naturally, but she still lives, and so I expect the stalemate yet stands.

His sisters? They, too, still survive. The main tribe remains steadfast in their duties, and I’ve already told you they know the trick of remaining immune to my call. Those mantises who embraced my light _chose_ to do so. Those who did not… well, it seems they’ll have their wish of outliving Hallownest after all.

I will admit it to you… I am jealous.

Why have I told you all of this, you ask?

Well, you certainly didn’t take to any of my previous attempts to take your mind off how you’re faring. Allow me to reiterate—I have chosen not to be cruel. If this occupies you better it is worth it.

And…

Well.

It is a terribly lonely thing, to be forgotten.

I would not see him face that death while his great heart still beats.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic got fanart from [sigma-castell](https://sigma-castell.tumblr.com/post/630895310958444544/)! thank you!!


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